DigiTimes reports that desktop variants of the so-called "K8L" chips for Socket AM2 and AM3 won't become available until 2008. According to DigiTimes' moles at Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers, AMD will kick off its transition to 65nm process technology on the desktop with new Athlon 64 X2 3800+, 4200+, and 4600+ chips in the first quarter of 2007, and dual-core Semprons will follow later in the year. These sources suggest that desktop K8L chips won't show up until at least the beginning of 2008.

In addition to the Athlon 64 X2, the production of AMD dual-core Athlon 64FX and single-core Sempron CPUs will also migrate to the 65nm node in 2007, the sources stated, noting that the 65nm Sempron will be upgraded to support DDR2 800 instead of DDR2 667. Prior to the launch of the Socket-AM2 CPUs, AMD intends to begin terminating orders for its non-Socket-AM2 processors-Socket-939 dual-core Athlon FX/X2 (codenamed Toledo), Socket-939 single-core Athlon 64 in the 1MB L2 version (codenamed San Diego), Socket-939 single-core Athlon 64 in the 512KB L2 version and the entry-level Socket-754 Sempron (codenamed Palermo)-by the end of 2006.

In other news, sources indicates that AMD Athlon 64 FX-64 is lunching in Q4, clocked at 3GHz, possessed 1MB x2 L2 Cache, and kept in 125 TDP. It is expected to price at US$1031, while AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 will drop to US$999, fighting with Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800. As expected, Intel also plans to release new Intel Core 2 Extreme into this war. Besides, with 65W TDP already existed in Athlon 64 X2 4600+(2.4GHz/512KBx2 L2), 4200+(2.2GHz/512KBx2 L2) and 3800+(2GHz/512KBx2 L2), AMD is going to expanse 65W TDP to the whole Athlon 64 X2 family in Q3. Athlon 64 X2 5000+ will appear in both 65W and 89W TDP versions, priced at US$465 and US$403, while the new Athlon 64 X2 5200+ (2.6GHz/1MBx2 L2) has 65W TDP only, priced at US$541.